Discover the reading level of your website. (Maybe).

While their instructions work on the assumption that you’re looking for a particular search term by reading level, it is also possible to combine it with the ‘site’ operator. Does this get a thumb-in-the-air approximation for the reading difficulty level of a website? Probably, but Google’s not saying. Its certainly worth giving it a go.

Why might this be useful? You probably have in mind who you would like your audience to be – who you write for. The ‘pass/fail’ result you get will depend on the abilities of your intended audience. If the least able members of that audience struggle to comprehend what you’ve written, then you’ve failed. On the other hand, if your target audience is highly educated and specialised then the advanced reading level is a way to filter out the entry-level content. Ability can be affected by a range of things – your audience may be still at school or may have a low reading age, may have problems concentrating (that could be a cognitive disability, or it could be environmental like a noisy office or screaming kids in the garden), may be new to your subject or may have a different first language with only an intermediate level of fluency in your chosen language.

How-to

Instead of a regular search term, type site:mydomain.com. Once on your search results page, look for the ‘Search tools’ button at the top, click it to show the extra tools and then choose ‘Reading level’ from the list opened by clicking ‘All results’

Example results

For my own site, I’d consider the most basic level of my intended audience to be new-ish to the topics I cover, so I’m fine with this split.

News / journalism

BBC News. Here’s the conundrum for them – while ‘dumbing down’ is broadly undesirable, license fee payers cover the whole spectrum of intelligence. How do you avoid someone being under-served by a service for which they contribute financially on the grounds that they’re not the sharpest knife in the drawer?

Compare with the BBC as a whole:

No surprises for the Sun

If you are not British you won’t understand why the image below is amusing. Sorry about that.

The Guardian is fairly consistent in its style.

Learning and education

The world wide web consortium. Subjects that fall under advanced are SMIL, Voice Browser Working Group, Internationalization, QA and a few other bits and pieces. Would they benefit from a rewrite to something with a lower cognitive barrier to entry?

Key Stage 1 – kids aged between 5 and 7

GCSE revision help – exams sat typically at 16 years old in England and Wales